The Solace of Open Spaces is a collection of transcendent, lyrical essays on life in the American West, capturing both its otherworldly beauty and its cruelty. Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make documentaries when her partner died. She stayed on, finding she couldn’t leave.

This book is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming,” a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life. Ehrlich brings depth, tenderness, and humor to her portraits of the peculiar souls who also call it home: hermits and ranchers, rodeo cowboys and schoolteachers, dreamers and realists.

Originally written as journal entries addressed to a friend, The Solace of Open Spaces is raw, meditative, electrifying, and uncommonly wise. In prose “as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning”, Ehrlich explores the magical interplay between our interior lives and the world around us.